


If We Shadows (We Two Boys)

by bonechina



Category: Dead Poets Society (1989)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief, M/M, Post-Canon, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-28
Updated: 2006-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 10:30:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonechina/pseuds/bonechina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shortly after Neil's suicide, Todd knows what he has lost and what is left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If We Shadows (We Two Boys)

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for mention of suicide, including method.

    Todd notes, in those first days after Neil's death -- days lifeless and endless and spent in purgatory -- that the others won't let him alone. Not the Society members (there is no Society), but the Others: people neither himself nor Neil, those sole inhabitants of Todd's new world. Teachers priests parents headmaster schoolboys: he has a protean entourage wherever he goes, classes lake library chapel and here, even here, the room where he sits vigil for an actor's ghost, an acted ghost, the second-and-final role of Neil's career. _Heaven and earth, Horatio_, Neil taunts from his afterlife one-man production. Todd has been reading _Hamlet_, Shakespeare like a two-way radio between them, and therefore should not have been surprised -- was not surprised, somewhere in his blown-off head -- to learn that the Others fear he is more an antique Roman than a Dane_._

    "They think you're going to do it too," Charlie says from Neil's chair. "Kill yourself." Nuwanda would have laughed at the suggestion, Todd knows, derisive and too utterly hip for such teacherly fears. Charlie, though, he's dead white, knuckles clenched in effort. As though it cost him to say, as though it were, somehow, forbidden. Todd thinks it might be. No one wants to drip that poison into his ear, even if they do suspect it's already taken up residence, corruption, a slow death in the orchard.

    "Oh," is all he says. "How considerate." And it is, in its way. An acknowledgment of what he and Neil held between them like it was blown glass. The condolences never reached him; they were for the Perrys, the headmaster, a mass of people referred to as Neil's friends, friends whose names Todd could not list even if he wanted. Never a word for him, Hamlet's Horatio, one of we two boys. Never a word about lost love (it _was _love; Todd's not stupid, Todd reads poetry, Todd would be an idiot not to see in the space between them exactly what existed in the space between the lines of countless countless sonnets. Todd can read Latin and Greek, thank you very much, can read the dry descriptions in books intended only for educated eyes. Inversion. Auden and Wilde and Housman. He isn't stupid). "No one else?" he asks, perversely possessive of this his only honor.

    "I don't know," Charlie lies. "What do you think, I'm in some kind of inner circle?" The look Todd gives him then is unsettling. There's something in his eyes the rest of them gave up when Keating left (when they gave Keating up for sacrifice, when they gave him up to what killed Neil) and he says "okay" like it's been beaten out out of him. "No. No one else."

    "All of you knew him longer than I did," Todd observes.

    "But you were the only one who wouldn't stop screaming. None of us needed sedatives. None of us started sleeping in his bed." Charlie sounds accusatory, like Todd has something he shouldn't, should what's in that look wither, let it descend to mere words (_words words_), forgotten Neil and Keating and Whitman and carpe diem and kneeling in his own bile in the snow.

    "I'm not," he says. "Not sleeping." And it's not a recent development, he doesn't say. He moved into Neil's bed when he denied his father and refused his prophesied doctorate; in for a penny in for a pound, they thought. Only weeks before Opening Night -- when Neil opened a play, opened his skull. Todd sat up in bed that night, missing Neil and his warm bulk, their chaste kisses and striped pyjamas, his biggest worry that Neil's father, his fucking father, would stop him acting. He doesn't know what his father did say, whether he yelled. Whether he told Neil that he wasn't his son, no son of his an actor (no son of his a fairy). He doesn't know whether Neil's father wrenched out of him any homosexual admission, whether he had assumed or whether Todd mattered enough, what they did mattered enough, even to be considered. Whether, if they hadn't clung together, he wouldn't have exacted a penalty in pounds of flesh from Neil's head. Whether he handed him the gun.

    Charlie shifts. Todd wonders how long it's been since he spoke, and why Charlie is uncomfortable with the silence Todd has always carried with him. It isn't a sign, he thinks, just like sleeping in Neil's bed isn't a sign, just like screaming his throat raw wasn't a sign. The Others are taking what he's always been and twisting it, longing for Neil into longing for death, Todd Anderson into dangerous lunatic. Which, he thinks, is characteristic of this entire affair, is what's rotten at the core of Welton. They twisted gentle Keating into a provoking monster, Neil's passion into some perversion he was pushed into, the Society into a Bolshevik enclave. It's like being the only sane man in a madhouse, but he wonders sometimes whether it isn't him who's crazy, a sweaty-toothed madman like Uncle Walt. It would be kinder, Todd thinks, if he were, if the Others' revisions to the script were what had really happened. He wouldn't have nearly the obsession he does now with living, bearing witness, drawing breath in pain. Not if the tale he knew in his bones were false. Not if he had -- hauntingly, Neil's voice in his ears now -- _but slumber'd here, while these visions did appear_. We shadows, we-two-boys-together-clinging shadows. Todd wished that were all it was. Wished he had moved beds after Neil shot himself.

    Charlie moves to leave -- Todd thinks they have a schedule posted somewhere, wonders whether it will be Rosencrantz or Guildenstern by next -- and if any of this were real Todd would swear he looked jealous. He knows why, of course; he alone kept what Keating gave them. It's just a shock to find that somewhere under all the layers of the new and subdued Charle Dalton, blazer repp-tie tucked-in shirt, Nuwanda exists. To find that the world as he knew it might not have ended entirely. This is either tragic or inspiring, but he doesn't quite care to untangle a vague impression from Charlie, not when he's come to keep watch and berate. Not when he and Neil have enough to untangle for themselves. "What you're doing," he says, "it won't help you." And with that he exits, not, Todd thinks, on a very strong line, because he can't know that Todd isn't doing anything, has not thought it meet to put an antic disposition on; he can't know what Todd has lost, not now that he has put a bullet through Nuwanda's head. It won't help (of course it won't), but Todd never thought he could help. Only observe, and record, and witness, and that at least is left to him, that at least was not buried with Neil's laughing eyes and shattered skull.  
    



End file.
